


Tiny Castle

by infinite_weyrbrat



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Warcraft, World of Warcraft
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-16
Updated: 2012-03-16
Packaged: 2017-11-02 00:48:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/363174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinite_weyrbrat/pseuds/infinite_weyrbrat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sin'dorei kingdoms are built of miniatures and magic... and this time, murder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tiny Castle

**Author's Note:**

> Tiny Castle, Tiny Barracks, and Tiny Altar of Kings were "instant building" items in Kael's introductory chapters of Frozen Throne.
> 
>  
> 
> (I wrote "Tiny Castle" in Patch 2.3 era, after belatedly catching the CSI arc that ended in "Living Doll/Dead Doll." When Patch 2.4 came out, a reader requested "Tiny Sunwell." That should be as far as the spoilers go in either fandom.)

Her name is Natalie, and she is the single best architect of Sin'dorei edifices I have on my payroll. She can model a castle, complete with statues and ornate golden decor, frills and lace and velvet, yet small enough to fit in your pocket. Here, I'm carrying two towers and an arcane library on my person. Just look, and you'll be amazed.

It's too bad, we used to say, too bad she isn't capable of casting the spells to turn those tiny models into reality. Too bad that to truly build a city on the scale of Silvermoon, she needs a mage -- or ten -- to follow her around and lend support. Too bad she's human. Now, I think that only those flaws might save us. 

I can forgive her race. I did, in fact, within five minutes of meeting her -- and I am not a forgiving man. "It's not fair," she said, in that low, persuasive voice of hers, that seems too earnest to be false. "The world isn't fair. So we, we have to be unfair back." When I pressed her, she gave an example involving chickens. I didn't really care, by that point. She was human, but she knew what it was like to be Sin'dorei. 

She is delightfully, meticulously, ruthlessly unfair. Every single tower, every single tiny castle, has death built into its very structure, in the form of miniscule dolls that resemble corpses. The bodies of our enemies are the price of our construction. At first, she was sparing, thinking that we had to kill her targets by hand and arrange them perfectly. At first, she insisted on planning and overseeing each and every assassination. Bored of the exercise, I informed her that, if done right, the arcane manifestation of a real edifice from her models ought to simply cause the targets to appear, dead, as planned. That was my second mistake -- the first was merely coming to Natalie's attention. 

A hundred fresh Kaldorei skulls grinned up from the foundation of her next tower. I applauded her, but then ordered them covered with a smooth lawn; they weren't actually attractive. She handed over a series of models of my enemies next, isolated murders and apparently accidental deaths. Perhaps you have seen Dragons' End, where the corpses of great black dragons still hang from spears of rock, hundreds of feet above a valley in the middle of the Blade's Edge Mountains? I am well aware that the gronn take credit, but believe me, that is Natalie's work. I saw it done. I'm still waiting to use her broken Deathwing. I'm curious to see how she thinks he drowned. 

Then, while she was doing some much more mundane work -- landscaping for the benefit of our envoys to the terminally hideous Black Temple -- she came to me one day, bearing a gift. "I made an extra statue," she said, with a demure, self-effacing shrug. "I thought you might like to choose where one of your own statues goes." 

I looked at the doll in my hand. It was, of course, a perfect little representation of me, caped and regal, adorned with a crown of magic itself. All the statues are. But the statues are enormous, a hundred feet tall. Even in the models, they are not particularly small. This doll threatened to slip between my fingers. 

It was the size of one of her tiny corpses. 

I looked at her. A tiny smile curved her lips. We understood each other all too well, it seemed. 

"May I keep it?" I asked. "I find it... charming." 

"Of course, Your Majesty," she replied with a bow, and I wondered just how many she had already made. How many different ways she had considered to kill me, perhaps at my own hand. She cannot bring her models to life -- or death -- but I, of course, can. 

I have two towers and an arcane library on my person, and I fear -- fear! -- to plant them on their foundations. I have inspected each one a dozen times, and seen no indication of a tiny Prince within their white walls, red velour and gold filigree. Yet I am unsure. 

Why, why am I continually saddled with the psychopaths, the lunatics, the hopelessly insane? Why can't I simply rule over an ordinary and dull bureaucracy and a wealth of magic? Life is just not fair.


	2. Tiny Sunwell

"As much as I am loath to admit it, it is not what we asked for."

The Exarch is frowning. I feign ignorance. "I don't understand. I used the latest surveys -- I took some of them myself. I made myself sick riding dragonhawks, but I replicated the topography exactly." I shudder. I hate dragonhawks, but not as much as I hated being stuck on that ship, the one that's now semi-permanently at anchor at the northern tip of Quel'Danas. I'm not the only seasicker, and there are birds to leave droppings, and there's mud, and all those things add up to those finicky Sin'dorei and fanatical Draenei mopping the deck every ten minutes. It's the smell that gets me. 

"There are the four towers," I continue, pointing out each of the gold-tipped red cones atop their alabaster heights. "No two the same height. The southern one casts a shadow just to the center of the Sunwell at midsummer noon each year, but the largest never blocks it. The walls around the Dead Scar really are asymmetrical..." 

"It is an excellent rendering," the Exarch admits, softening. "I did not expect so much detail. And the use of real materials adds a sort of -- I suppose the blood elves taught you to do that, didn't they? To augment the magical connection?" 

He waves his gloved fingers over the wood-chip trees, lovingly hand-carved, curves the joints of the first finger to indicate the shape of the gold-foil-shelled dome below the highest tower. He hesitates a moment, looking at the Sunwell itself. The water in it is a shade too blue, but he is Draenei, and doesn't know what it means, much less how long ago I had to steal a single drop of azure "dye." Instead, he looks at the blood-soaked, poisoned mud of my Dead Scar replica -- I brought back a sack of the real thing, at great peril to myself, I might add. You can see a pinhead-sized depression in the miniature where I took it out. 

I shrug. Actually the blood elves taught me no such thing, but they never complained about it, either. "I didn't create the magical link. I have to find a mage to do that for me. I don't have any magic myself... but there's usually a mage around somewhere." 

"Particularly on the Scryers' Tier." The Exarch nods. He's Aldor, of course, and well aware of the Scryers' appeal to mages. He's being tolerant, for the moment, of us, but only because A'dal told him to. 

Looking at me, I expect he sees a recent recruit, lured with the promise of spellthread or daggers or something. I'm human, after all. Not too many guess that I'm a "real" Scryer, former Sunfury, formerly under the direct command of Kael'thas Sunstrider. I built his tiny castles, his towers, his camps and mana forges, his golden statues. I made little figurines for him, tiny Lich Kings for him to stick needles into, tiny Illidans to tear the wings off of. I noticed, every week when I came aboard the Eye, how my one sculpted Kil'Jaeden remained unbroken and menacing. He knew I knew. He also knew it didn't concern me much either way. 

I wasn't one of the early converts to the Light and the near-worship of A'dal. In fact, I didn't really leave Kael at all. He left me. Abandoned me. I was too much trouble, too dangerous, too crazy, too broken, and most of all, too devoid of magic. And here I am, in the sanctuary city, in the chamber of the Naaru, listening to the troubling wind-chimes that are A'dal's "voice." 

"No, it is almost perfect," the Exarch muses, his accent trilling consonants and rolling vowels. "The magic will show us the exact progress of our forces, and your careful survey guarantees no surprises. There is only one thing..." He points down, below the shields, to the side of the Sunwell, where a tiny figure is sprawled. "This. We have not killed Kael yet." 

"But you will," I say, blinking up at him, as if he has wounded me with his lack of confidence in himself. 

He looks down at me from his proud seven foot vantage point, and his face is as troubled as A'dal's melody. "Our intelligence suggests he himself is nowhere near the Sunwell." 

I shrug again, and reach down through the shimmering shields to remove the figure, my thumbnail slicing through the glue that holds him in place. A trace remains, and I frown, trying to clean it up a bit with my other hand, before I give up on that, too. 

"Much better," the Exarch says. "There is little I want more than to see him dead, but we should not be premature." 

I nod at him. I don't smile. I'm not the type that smiles much. He counts out my pay, and it is scrupulously as arranged. I walk off with the sack of gold weighing heavy in one hand, the Kael doll light in the other. My finger rubs absently over the nap of his velveteen cloak, over the carefully-invisible injection site in his doll-flesh. I had thought to kill the man with the magic he lived by, but perhaps I will have to do it the old fashioned way after all. 

Behind me, A'dal's song jangles, ever more discordant. Idly, low-voiced, I begin to sing along.


End file.
